Kicked off this morning in Seattle was Valve's first Steam Dev Days conference where they were pushing their Steam Machines and Linux-based SteamOS agenda, OpenGL/Linux gaming, VR, and other hot topics.

For those AMD Radeon customers disappointed by the buggy and poor performance of the Catalyst Linux graphics driver with Steam games, Valve has released a preview driver via their SteamOS repository. This AMD Catalyst preview driver for Linux hasn't been made available elsewhere.

At the start of every month one of our rituals is always checking in on Valve's Steam Software/Hardware Survey to see their Linux statistics for the month prior. Let's see how Steam Linux usage was in December with the arrival of SteamOS...

While ardent Linux gamers have likely already heard and own a copy, for those that didn't hear yet Valve's latest kindness, the Linux-friendly entertainment company is giving away their very popular Left 4 Dead 2 game today and tomorrow as a Christmas present to gamers.

Just one week after doing the first public beta release of SteamOS, Valve Software has released the second beta public ISO image. This new release has various package updates and fixes, including graphics driver work.

Valve has just revealed their first 300 beta units of Steam Machines and their Steam Controllers are shipping this week, Friday the 13th. Also available at this time will be the first public SteamOS images!

Word has now gotten out that iBuyPower is planning to introduce their own Steam Machines device next year that is powered by the Linux-based SteamOS and will be using an AMD processor and AMD graphics.

It was one year ago today that Valve first made available the Steam Linux beta! While Phoronix was exclusively covering Valve's Linux developments in the months prior, it was on 6 November 2012 that Valve began rolling out the Steam Linux beta to selected participants.

While Valve is mostly centered around supporting Ubuntu right now when it comes to their Linux initiatives, the Steam client and its games will generally work fine on other modern Linux distributions. For making it easier to run Steam on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the binary package has entered the third-party RPM Fusion repository.

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